


let facts be submitted to a candid world

by nothingunrealistic



Category: Dear Evan Hansen - Pasek & Paul/Levenson
Genre: Alternate Universe - National Treasure Fusion, Canon Character of Color, Canon Jewish Character, F/F, Friendship, GAY/LESBIAN SOLIDARITY, Gen, Gratuitous Historical References, Grief/Mourning, Medium Burn, Minor Character Death, Sky Lakota-Lynch!Jared, canon? i don't know her, gratuitous literary references, romantic dramedy
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-08-25
Updated: 2018-10-29
Packaged: 2019-07-02 04:22:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 11,299
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15788877
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nothingunrealistic/pseuds/nothingunrealistic
Summary: Alana’s always believed in the importance of doing whatever you can to help as many people as you can. Even if it isn’t the easy thing, or the strictly legal thing, to do.And even if it means stealing the Declaration of Independence.





	1. places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant

**Author's Note:**

> *pops out of my hole in the ground after seven and a half months* hey guys what's up
> 
> National Treasure is a delightful movie, but you should be able to follow this fic just fine even if you haven't seen it.
> 
> Fic title and all chapter titles are from the Declaration of Independence, because why not.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warnings: discussions of death, a brief depiction of a self-inflicted injury (although not in the context of self-harm) and blood.

#### WASHINGTON, D.C.

#### JULY 2000

There are thirteen stairs from the second floor of Alana’s grandma’s house to the attic. Some creak under Alana’s feet as she climbs; she hasn’t walked up these stairs often enough to know where all the squeaky spots are and avoid them. Her social studies class has been talking about the thirteen colonies for the past week, and she lists them in her head, one for each step. _New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut…_

The stairs for New York and Pennsylvania are especially noisy — she pauses after both to listen for footsteps elsewhere in the house — but Alana makes it to the top undetected. Up here, directly under the roof, the rain beating on the shingles is louder, and the occasional streaks of lightning through the windows are brighter; she turns on her flashlight anyway, not wanting to have to depend on the storm to see. The single beam throws out long shadows behind the old furniture and antiques that fill the attic.

Alana picks her way through the clutter, stepping around scratched-up rocking chairs and empty vases and globes with the paper peeling off, until she reaches the tall bookshelf at the back. The top shelf is far above her head, but the book she wants is right at eye level. She lifts it gingerly from the top of a stack of books, wiping dust from the cover, and opens it to the first page.

Thunder cracks outside, rattling through the rafters. Alana shifts the book into the crook of one elbow and turns the flashlight around in her other hand to point it at the page.

“Alana? What are you doing up here by yourself, baby?”

Alana whirls around, clutching the open book to her chest and holding out the flashlight in front of her like a sword.

Her grandma is standing at the top of the stairs, reaching for a light switch. The sounds of the storm must have kept Alana from hearing her.

“I…” Fumbling with everything in her hands is too hard to do while explaining; once her grandma has turned on the light, a lamp with one bulb hanging from the ceiling, Alana turns off her flashlight and sets it on the floor. “The last time I came up here, with you, I saw this.” She holds out the book, smoothing out a crumpled corner of one of the pages. “And I wanted to know what it said, but I didn’t want to ask you.”

It doesn’t make sense when she says it out loud like that, but her grandma understands, somehow. She always does.

“You don’t have to be afraid to ask me anything.” She comes closer, stepping carefully just like Alana had, and turns over the cover of the book. “And you’re old enough to know what this says, now. It’s about our history.”

“The history of America?”

“America, the world, and our family, too. Come downstairs and I’ll tell you.”

Alana hands the book to her grandma, who closes it, and picks up her flashlight. Together, they navigate the attic; once Alana turns off the attic light, they go down the thirteen stairs to the second floor and another fourteen to the first. They sit in the same pair of armchairs in the living room that they always have, Alana at her grandma’s left side.

“This is a very old story,” her grandma says. “But our part of it starts in 1817, on a night like this, with Thomas McKean. He was the last man to sign the Declaration of Independence… and he was part of a secret society, called the Freemasons. And he was dying.” She flips the book open to one of the first pages, showing Alana a glued-in portrait of a man with a long, stern face and a curly white wig. “A week before, he’d ordered his stable boy to take him from Philadelphia, where he lived, to the White House, so he could speak to President Monroe as soon as possible.”

“Did he get to talk to the president?”

Alana’s grandma shakes her head. “Mr. McKean didn’t even make it as far as the White House. But he had a secret, and he knew he had to tell someone. So he told his stable boy, the only person he could tell. And that was my grandmother’s grandfather, Benjamin Beck, who was just about your age then.”

“What was his secret?” Alana whispers.

Her grandma leans in, eyes twinkling, lowering her voice like she’s sharing a secret too.

“A treasure. All the treasures of all the empires of Africa and Asia and Europe together. A treasure that kings and queens and tyrants and emperors had fought about for centuries, one that kept growing and growing… until it disappeared.” She snaps her fingers. “Just like that.”

“Forever?”

“Not forever. But for a long time. It was gone for over a thousand years, until the First Crusade. The knights who invaded Jerusalem found the treasure again, in vaults under the ruins of the Temple of Solomon. They decided that the treasure was too great for any one person, even a king or a pope. So they took it back to Europe and founded an order, the Knights Templar, dedicated to protecting it.” Another page, this one showing photos of castles and fortresses with high towers and gleaming golden domes. “Two hundred years later, when the Knights were scattered and killed, the survivors fled to Scotland with the treasure. They were the first Freemasons. And when Europeans started traveling to the Western Hemisphere, the Freemasons went too, bringing the treasure with them and adding riches to it from the empires of the Americas.”

Alana scoots forward in her armchair to look at the pictures more closely. “So where did it end up then?”

“No one knows. The treasure had been hidden again by the time the Revolutionary War began. A few of the Freemasons among the Founding Fathers, like George Washington and Benjamin Franklin, knew where it was hidden, and others had clues to where it was. But over the years, the secret keepers died, and the clues were lost, until only one was left. Mr. McKean had kept that clue secret for decades, until he gave it to Benjamin Beck.”

Alana’s grandma turns the page again and opens an envelope that’s secured into the book with layers of clear, shiny tape, taking out a piece of paper that’s yellowed and cracking and frayed around the edges. She hands it to Alana, who reads the single sentence written across it in old, loopy script.

_The secret lies with Charlotte._

“Who’s Charlotte?” Alana asks, handing the scrap of paper back. Her grandma just shrugs as she takes it.

“If Mr. McKean knew, he never told a soul. Benjamin spent many years looking for Charlotte. He told the story to his daughter, Phyllis, and she took up the search.” She points to a photo on the facing page, of a serious man in dust-smeared clothes and a little girl who looks so much like Alana that it’s spooky. The handwritten caption says they’re in Mexico. “Generations of Becks, our mothers and grandmothers, tried to find Charlotte and failed.”

“Because she doesn’t exist.”

Alana looks up. Her mom is standing in the entryway to the living room, her purse hanging from her hand. There are lines around her eyes.

“There’s no Charlotte, and there’s no treasure,” her mom says, walking up to the pair of them in their armchairs. “I don’t know why you’re telling her this story, Mama.”

“I told it to you too, Ida,” Alana’s grandma says, closing the book. “It’s our family’s history.”

“I remember.”

“And just because you didn’t find Charlotte, that doesn’t mean she’s not out there.” Her grandma pulls a dollar bill out of her pocket. “The signs that the Freemason founders left us are still real. The all-seeing eye —”

“— and the unfinished pyramid,” Alana’s mom finishes. “Yes, I know. I spent enough money and time chasing those signs. Just like you, and all the Becks since Benjamin.”

“The money isn’t the point. It never has been.”

“We’ll be going soon, Alana,” her mom says, turning away from her grandma. “Your dad’s packing up the car. Now’s the time to say goodbye.”

She leaves; Alana and her grandma remain, just sitting. It feels like the floor got yanked out from under their conversation, and now there’s just a hole in the middle of the room where the story was.

“Grandma?”

“Yes?”

“Was Benjamin a slave?” Alana’s social studies class has been talking about slavery too. She wishes all the other kids wouldn’t stare at her whenever it comes up. “When he worked for Mr. McKean?”

“No. He was a free man. And all of his descendants were free too.” Her grandma opens the book again, to the photo of Benjamin and Phyllis. “We were very lucky that that was the case.”

“Were any of them Freemasons?” Alana pushes herself up on the arm of the chair. “Are we?”

“The Freemasons didn’t let women join them, back then. Most of them still don’t.” The frown on Alana’s face must be pretty obvious, because her grandma reaches out and gently pats her hand. “But that doesn’t mean you, or any of us, don’t deserve to find the treasure. It belongs to the whole world, not just them.”

“Maybe you have to be one to know how, though,” Alana says. “Maybe they know things we don’t, and that’s why none of us could find it.”

“Listen to me, baby.” Both of her grandma’s hands close around her own. “More than anything else, the Freemasons believed in unconditional love, charity, and truth. You know what those all mean?”

Alana nods.

“The Freemasons didn’t always live up to those ideas, but they believed in them. If you do your best to live out those ideas, every day, it won’t matter that you’re not one of them, or that you don’t know all their secrets. It’s what you say and what you do that’s important. Understand?”

“Yes, Grandma.”

“You think you can do that?”

Alana squeezes her grandma’s hand, the one under her own.

“I know I can.”

* * *

* * *

#### BAFFIN ISLAND, NU

#### OCTOBER 2017

“It’s amazing to think about Peary and his party traversing this kind of terrain on foot and by dog sled,” Alana says to Dana, raising her voice over the rumble of the snowcat’s engine. “And Henson going on alone to plant the flag. That was just over a century ago. Can you believe?”

“It’s unimaginable,” Dana says. She’s staring out her side window, at the seemingly infinite snow-covered landscape. Alana wonders if Dana’s picturing them too, traipsing through the drifts just a few hundred yards away and shivering.

Shrill electronic beeping rises from the back row, followed by rapid tapping on a keyboard. The top of Jared’s knit cap as he hunches over a laptop is just visible in the rearview mirror.

“Does that mean we’re close, then?” That’s Patel, who’s sitting in the back for the same reason as Jared — neither of them have the training to drive the snowcat or the temerity to challenge Dana for the front passenger seat.

“Pretty close — a little to the left here.” Alana adjusts her course accordingly. “Of course, that’s assuming Alana’s theory and my simulation are both accurate. Which they should be, considering we’re brilliant, but you can never be too sure.”

Dana snorts. “And so humble, too. Is he always like this?”

In fact, Jared is nearly as nervous as Alana is about this expedition going well — he’d told her as much on the flight to Ottawa, when they’d been seated out of earshot of Dana and her crew. No reason to share that, though. “I think this climate is affecting his sense of modesty,” she says instead. “Is there a window open back there?”

“Excuse you, I’m thriving despite this weather,” Jared retorts. “As terrible as it is. No place this cold should have anything this important in it.”

“I thought you were from upstate New York.” He’s only said it about a hundred times in the handful of years they’ve known each other. “Shouldn’t you be used to this kind of cold?”

“Yeah, in the winter. Not October. Canada is bullshit.”

“Maybe you two need to huddle for warmth,” Patel says before bursting into laughter, joined quickly by Dana. Checking the rearview mirror again, Alana sees Jared looking back at her, rolling his eyes, mouth a horizontal line. How Dana and her team are still convinced that Alana and Jared are some kind of couple is beyond her understanding, and apparently Jared’s too.

Then the beeping starts again, more rapid and insistent, and everyone quiets down.

“Target reached,” Jared reads out from the laptop screen. “Ninety-nine percent certainty.”

They’ve arrived.

Alana brakes gradually, giving the rest of Dana’s crew in the second snowcat behind them time to slow down, before stopping completely and shutting off the engine. She undoes her seatbelt and pops open the door to get out almost immediately, followed by Dana and Patel; Jared is last, scrambling to pack away all the electronics before daring to step into the freezing air.

“Why’re we stopped?” Holtzer, the driver of the other snowcat, has emerged from its cabin, as has Harris, the last member of Dana’s team. “Aren’t we looking for a ship?”

“I don’t see one,” Harris says. He has a point. From here, all that’s visible is boundless slate-gray sky and glaring Arctic tundra, a blank canvas of snow.

Of course, appearances aren’t everything.

“There’s a ship out there,” Alana says. “We just need to look closer.”

At Dana’s insistence, Holtzer and Harris unload half a dozen metal detectors from the back row of their snowcat and distribute them. Everyone spreads out and starts scanning.

“This is a waste of our time,” Alana overhears Harris saying as she crosses in front of him and Jared. “This ship was supposed to have sailed from Québec to Liverpool. How could it have ended up out here?”

“Well, I’m not an expert,” Jared begins, in a tone that Alana learned to recognize as _I know more than you_ after about six months of friendship, “but it could be that the meteorological properties of this region of Canada, combined with the topographic characteristics of this specific waterway due to the glacial activity that formed it, make it exceptionally prone to hurricane-force ice storms…”

Alana picks up her pace, trying to get far enough away that she doesn’t have to listen to the rest of Jared’s deliberately overblown lecturing or suppress her laughter at the thought of Harris being bombarded with it, and her metal detector starts beeping wildly. She shifts it around incrementally, fine-tuning her position until the sound speeds up into an unbroken wail. Then she shuts it off and draws an ice axe from her belt.

The thin crust of ice yields easily to the first blow of her axe. A few inches of snow below that are soft and fluffy; they cover up another layer of icy snow. There are several alternating layers, Alana discovers as she keeps digging. Multiple depositions of snow, probably, from a series of snowstorms that happened some time apart, enough time for the surface of each new snowfall to freeze over —

_CLANG._

Initially stunned into stillness by the sound, Alana soon drops the axe and kneels down, pushing the snow away from the surface of _something_ with her gloved hands. Her digging reveals a convex piece of metal, dark grayish-bronze and carefully shaped, with cast text along the bottom. The letters are too clogged with wet snow to be readable; she grabs a water bottle from her pack, twists off the lid, and pours a thin stream of water onto the object, revealing the letters one by one.

_C H A R L O T T E_

“There you are,” Alana murmurs, placing her hand on the name. “I thought you might turn up.”

Then she raises her voice and calls out “Over here!”, and five pairs of feet come running at once.

* * *

“You know, Dana,” Alana says, slinging a shovelful of snow over her shoulder, “if you hadn’t believed me about the treasure, or hadn’t offered to fund me, I doubt I would have ever found Charlotte.” She plants the shovel upright in the snow and lets go of it to stretch. “It’s so strange to think that that was just last year.”

“I was sure you’d find it.” Dana leans her shovel against the newly uncovered hull of the _Charlotte._ Holtzer and Harris are at the wheels of the snowcats now, bulldozing away the piles of snow the rest of them have dug out of the ship; the figurehead, the upper deck, and the remains of the masts are visible for the first time in nearly two centuries. “It was just a question of when. Not nearly as crazy a venture as people wanted me to think.”

“I’m just glad I’m not as crazy as everyone thought,” Alana confesses. “Or my mother. Or my grandmother — I wish she’d lived long enough to see this. I’m sure she could have if she hadn’t broken her hip.”

“…Well. Alright.”

She’s said something wrong for sure. “Let’s check out what’s inside this ship.”

“Absolutely.” Dana pulls a walkie-talkie from an inside pocket of her overcoat and says something short and cryptic into it. Holtzer strolls up to them within a minute, and by the time he arrives Alana has waved Jared over as well. “Time to find some treasure.”

The four of them head down a ladder, icy in some spots, to the second deck. With all the portholes still under the snow, it’s far too dark to see; Alana removes her glacier glasses and turns on her flashlight, and three more streams of light soon join hers. Several rope hammocks hang from the overhead, some attached by only a few intact strands.

“We should spread out,” Alana says. Jared veers off to the left, while Dana and Holtzer move to her right. Within ten seconds, there’s a crunching noise and muffled swearing ahead of her. Swinging her flashlight to the source of the sound reveals Jared, with a fist pressed to his mouth, and a frozen, mostly skeletal corpse on the floor at his feet, not far from one of the hammocks.

“You know,” Jared says eventually, scraping the sole of one boot against the floor, “I probably should have expected dead bodies on the creepy two-hundred-year-old ship lost in the Arctic.”

Alana nods. “Especially on the berth deck.”

All four of them reach the ladderway at the other end of the ship without stepping on any more human remains or finding anything of value. Dana leads them down to the next level this time.

“How big is this boat, anyway?” Holtzer says in an undertone.

“It has three decks, including this one,” Alana says. “And the cargo hold below this deck.”

Holtzer mutters something unintelligible and steps off the last tread, shouldering open the door for Dana.

Half the floor space of the deck is taken up by casks and barrels in a range of sizes — some could barely fit a gallon of water, some could easily hold a person. (Hopefully none of them contain a person.) A small desk strewn with paper and quill pens stands off to one side. Dana heads to one of the barrels, pushing the dangling ship’s cables out of her way, and yanks out the plug. The barrel tips over, spilling out a black substance; Dana grabs a handful and smells it.

“Gunpowder,” she says, before opening her hand and letting it trickle between her fingers onto the floor.

Jared and Holtzer start poking through other barrels. Alana advances further along the deck, scanning back and forth until her light falls on a second ice-crusted skeleton. She does flinch — it’s an unpleasant surprise despite her anticipating it — but her curiosity wins out soon enough, and she moves closer.

There’s a rifle in its hands and a tricorn hat at an angle on its head. The captain, then. A frayed loop of rope winds around its waist and the barrel it’s sitting against, secured by a knot in its lap. Alana studies the knot; from the way it’s tied, the captain must have made it.

So why would the captain have tied himself to a barrel?

“Maybe he was guarding it,” Alana says, aloud but still to herself. “But why this one?”

The top head of the barrel is missing completely. Alana tugs it to the ground with her ice axe, and gunpowder cascades out, bringing with it an object wrapped in canvas and tied with twine.

“All of these barrels are just full of — oh, hey,” Jared says, walking up behind her. “That looks like an important thing.”

“It might be.” After pulling off her gloves and unsuccessfully picking at the knots in the twine for several seconds, Alana slices through it with her pocket knife, which she sets on the floor. The twine falls into the pile of gunpowder, letting the top flap of the canvas unfold.

“How’d you get that past the TSA?”

“Checked luggage.”

“Found something?” Dana appears at Alana’s side. Her boots are covered in a fine layer of gunpowder. “More luck than I’ve had.”

Alana unwraps the rest of the canvas and tosses it aside. The object within is a lacquered wooden box, with golden trim and an image of an eye carved into the lid.

_The all-seeing eye._

She flicks open the hasp and lifts the lid.

Inside the box, on a satin-lined cushion, rests a smoking pipe, with a sleek mahogany stem and a gleaming ivory-colored bowl, carved with towers, parapets, and knights on horseback with banners flying.

“Oh my God.” Alana lifts the pipe from the box. “Do you guys know what this is?”

Jared squints at it. “Is it… a famous dead white guy’s pipe?”

“Meerschaum.” Dana takes it from Alana’s hand, glancing it over, then passes it back. “I have a few. That one’s pretty well done.”

“The design of the bowl looks just like the Convent of Christ Castle,” Alana says, rapidly flipping it over and around to look at all the sides. “It was one of the Templars’ strongholds. And the scrollwork on the shank is incredibly detailed.” Actually, the longer she examines the shank, the less the etchings on it look like abstract designs. More like… lettering? A message? But it’s impossible to read as is.

“Is it a famous dead white guy’s _expensive_ pipe?”

“Better than that.” Alana grips the bowl in one hand and pulls on the stem; it pops loose, and the shank comes with it. Most likely a custom design. “It’s a clue. And it means we’re getting closer to the treasure.” She gets up off the floor and hurries over to the desk, setting the pieces of the pipe down to rummage through the drawers and search the desktop.

“Closer?” Dana echoes. “Didn’t you say the treasure would be here?”

“I said it could be. ‘The secret lies with Charlotte,’ remember? It might mean the treasure itself, or it might not.” Alana slams a drawer shut. “Why isn’t there any ink here? There should be ink.”

“Dead men write no letters,” Holtzer says, smirking. When he’d stopped looking through the barrels, Alana has no idea.

She looks down at her own hands and bites her lip. “Jared, could you give me my pocket knife? And then you should probably look away.”

“Uh, sure,” Jared says, searching for it in the gunpowder puddle. “Happy to do you that totally normal and not at all ominous favor.” He hands her the knife handle-first, holding the guard between two fingers as if he’s worried it’ll sting him, then stares at the floor as soon as it’s out of his grasp.

Alana sets the tip of the knife against the pad of her left thumb, grits her teeth, and digs the point in until blood wells up around the blade. One-handed, she swaps the knife for the stem of the pipe, rubbing her thumb across and along the shank to cover it in blood. It stings terribly, and she’s kind of kicking herself for not having anything else to use.

“Is that your blood?” Sounds like Jared looked up. “What the fuck.”

She shrugs. “There wasn’t any ink.”

Dana and Holtzer are still watching her without speaking, arms crossed, leaning against a pair of barrels. Alana rolls the shank of the pipe along a sheet of paper on the desk. Two columns of tiny, closely set text appear, interspersed with images of compasses and squares, Greek crosses, and crescent moons. Unexpectedly, the letters are printed forward — no wonder she couldn’t read them on the pipe, then — but they’re so patchy and curvy that they’re impossible to read in the dimness of the ship. “Could someone give me a light?”

Jared points his flashlight at the scroll of paper. Alana tilts the head of the flashlight down a fraction and reads the message aloud.

_The legend writ_

_The flame revealed_

_The key in Silence yet concealed_

_Fifty-six in firmest hand_

_Matlack it need not withstand_

“So what does that tell us?” Dana asks.

“It’s a riddle.” Alana drops the flashlight to start pacing. “‘The legend writ’ could be the legend of the Templar treasure. A lot of the Knights were burned at the stake, which was what led the rest to leave France with the treasure, so ‘the flame revealed’ might mean the Templars’ execution revealing the treasure’s existence.”

“Well, that’s morbid,” Jared says. “Is ‘the key in Silence yet concealed’ actually about killing someone to shut them up and hiding their body?”

“Most likely not.” She puts the paper back under the light, studying the first three lines again. “The way this is written, ‘the flame revealed’ could also mean that the key was revealed by the flame, but that can’t be right if the key is still concealed.” If the Masons insisted on being so cryptic about the wording of their clues, she thinks, they could at least have punctuated them a little less ambiguously.

Jared spins the flashlight around in his hand. “Maybe the legend _is_ the key.”

He sounds like he’s joking, but he might have a point anyway. “If the legend is the key — oh!” Her fingers twitch with a sudden, mundane memory of copying words and definitions from a middle school geography book, bold text on thin, glossy pages. “The legend and the key are the same thing on a map. It’s a map, one that’s yet concealed, still hidden, but that could be shown using a flame.”

“Like invisible ink?”

“Exactly. So a map, a hidden map, with a key that’s ‘in Silence.’” First strange punctuation, now strange capitalization. Although… “That might refer to —”

“Where’s this invisible map, then?” Dana strides over to Alana and plucks the paper from her hand. “And what does the second half of this mean?”

“That I’m not sure about. Fifty six might be a year, but I don’t know what the ‘firmest hand’ would be.” The word Matlack is familiar too — a name, she’s certain — but the context escapes her.

“The king?” Holtzer suggests.

“Are we just saying words now?” Jared says. “Subaru. Dragonfly. Vampire.”

Holtzer glares at him before continuing. “He was a tyrant, wasn’t he? Ruled with an iron fist? Sounds like a firm hand to me.”

“Maybe.” Metaphors are fine, she can do metaphors, but Holtzer’s explanation feels just a bit _off_ all the same. “If this is referring to a map, a paper map, ‘hand’ probably means something that was written or drawn. And whatever was written was firm. It was unyielding, it was adamant, it was… it was resolved —”

_Resolved, that these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent States…_

She’s got it.

“It was a resolution,” Alana says, “that fifty-six people signed, one that there was no compromising on. One that had the map on the reverse side, where it wouldn’t have to withstand being written on by Matlack — Timothy Matlack, he was the Continental Congress’ scribe.” Silently, she thanks her brain for finally giving her that piece of information. “A resolution more commonly called the Declaration of Independence.”

Dana, Holtzer, and Jared all stare at her.

“You’re telling us,” Jared says, slowly, deliberately, “that there’s an invisible treasure map on the back of the Declaration of Independence.”

“Yes.”

_“Why.”_

“It’s not a terrible idea,” Dana says. “Putting the map on a document that important would make sure it stayed intact. And you said there were Masons among the signers, right?”

“At least nine. And Washington was a Mason too, as well as a surveyor. He could have easily made the map.”

“Excellent.” Dana claps her hands together. “So how do we see it?”

“Um.” And there’s the rub. Because anything significant enough to be preserved for two and a half centuries is also significant enough to be locked away and closely guarded and kept far out of the reach of history majors searching for ancient treasure. “Barring any highly unusual circumstances, we don’t.”

“Why not? We can at least ask for a viewing.”

“And we won’t get one,” Alana says. “It’s the most important document in American history. No one’s going to let us touch it, let alone run chemical tests on it.”

“You know how they say it’s easier to ask for forgiveness than permission?”

“Of course.” Something is strange about Dana’s tone, too light and laid back.

“I say we don’t bother getting permission.”

Alana’s stomach drops. “You want to steal it.”

“Oh, don’t say that like it makes me some kind of monster,” Dana snaps. “Listen to me. This is the world’s greatest treasure we’re talking about. It’s what you’ve been working for your whole life.”

“Is it? I had no idea.”

“And what have you gotten for it? Total disrespect, toward you and your family, from anyone who cares about history. I want to help you prove them wrong.”

“Really?” Jared says. “Sounds to me like you want to make sure your investment pays off.”

“Dana, I appreciate that you’re trying to help me.” Not that Alana thinks that’s even close to being Dana’s only motive, but it’s safer to give her the benefit of the doubt, at least out loud. “But I can’t go along with this.”

“Well, you don’t need to. I can take care of the whole operation myself. It wouldn’t be the first time I’ve pulled off something that’s… less than legal.”

“Or the second,” Holtzer adds.

“You won’t have to lift a finger.” Dana steps closer, looking up at Alana. “All I’ll need you to do is figure out the map.”

For a moment, Alana lets herself picture it. Holding the Declaration of Independence, its aging parchment and soaring phrases, in her own hands. Discovering its millennia-old secrets, overlooked by all the historians and conservationists who called her family hopeless, mindless dreamers. Finding the treasure.

But the Declaration isn’t hers. And simply _wanting,_ no matter how much, can’t justify taking it.

“No.” Alana steps back. “I’m not going to help you steal it, or let you steal it for me.”

Dana’s eyes go cold. “Well, if that’s how you feel,” she says, spinning on her heel and returning to Holtzer’s side. “Matt, will you?”

And before Alana can even blink, Holtzer draws a gun from inside his coat and aims it at her head.

Jared barges forward from behind Holtzer, reaching for the gun, and gets shoved back by a jab of his elbow. Alana carefully raises her empty hands. “You don’t want to do this.”

“No,” Dana says. “I don’t. But I’m not going to let you stand in my way after spending half a million dollars to get this far.”

“Without me, you won’t get any farther.” Alana tries to summon up some of that cockiness that Jared wears so readily. “There’s more to the riddle. More information, that I know and you don’t. And whatever clue it leads to next, you’ll need me to figure out that as well. If you just…” She takes a deep breath. “If you shoot me now, you’ll never find the treasure.” Even that hypothetical makes her heart race.

Dana stares her down. “How do I know you’re not bluffing?”

“I’m a terrible liar. Just ask Jared.”

“Yeah, she sucks at it,” Jared offers immediately. “This one time —”

Dana nudges Holtzer, who turns his gun on Jared. “Tell me what I need to know, or Holtzer will shoot him instead.”

“What the hell!” Jared yelps, taking a few steps away. With their focus off of her, Alana rummages frantically through her pack, hoping to find something, anything to give her leverage. Pocket knife, ice axe, protein bars…

“Shut up, Jared,” Dana says. “You are so goddamn annoying, and now you’re unnecessary. The list of reasons not to shoot you is getting shorter.”

Jared backs up so quickly that he slams into one of the bulkheads.

Water bottle, glacier glasses, and —

“Hey, Dana?” Alana pulls a flare from the bag. “Here’s a reason.” She twists off the cap and strikes it; the flare sputters to life, glowing red and spitting molten sparks. “This ship is full of gunpowder, and we’re all standing in it. If you shoot me, or him, I’ll drop this, and the resulting deflagration will almost certainly kill us all.”

“Are you sure that’s really better?” Jared whispers.

“Flares burn down.” Dana hasn’t moved an inch. “And I can wait. So what do I need to know?”

Alana steadies her grip on the flare. “What you need to know is, how good are Holtzer’s reflexes?”

“What?”

She tosses the flare underhand right at Holtzer, not even pausing to watch it pinwheel through the air before darting to Jared’s side, tugging him out of Holtzer’s line of fire by his arm.

Its trajectory ends in Dana’s hand, just above Holtzer’s boots. She laughs. “Nice try, but —”

Dana’s sleeve catches on fire.

“Shit!”

In trying to smother the flame, Dana drops the flare, right into a pile of gunpowder. A spurt of fire shoots up from the deck, higher than Alana’s head, and starts to spread, blocking her and Jared’s path to the doorway. Two gunshots boom out, echoing through the ship and forcing them to duck behind coils of rope.

“Why are you shooting at us?” Jared yells at Holtzer, whose gun is still in his hand. “Everything’s on fire!”

Dana calls out something to Holtzer that Alana can’t hear over the roar of the fire and the ringing in her ears, and they run for the door, Dana grabbing the pipe off the desk as she goes.

Halfway through the door, Dana pauses and looks back, holding Alana’s gaze through the smoke and sparks. Alana wonders if she’s feeling some last-minute regret.

Then a burning timber swings downward toward Dana, and she slams the door with a metallic thud.

They’re trapped.

“I really hope you have a plan,” Jared shouts in her ear. Frankly, she should have had a plan before deciding to risk blowing up the ship, but right now she has maybe half of one.

“The cargo hold,” Alana shouts back. “Look for a hatch in the floor.”

She drops to her hands and knees, feeling around for a gap in the boards or an old rusted hinge. Jared does the same, scrabbling in the dusting of powder. “I think I found something!” he shouts, and lifts up a moldering trap door by an iron ring.

“That’s it!” Alana helps him shove the door the rest of the way open. “Get in!”

Jared wriggles through the hatch, hanging onto the edges by his fingertips before letting go and dropping to the deck. The flames are coming closer. Alana lowers herself through, stepping on Jared’s raised cupped hands, and yanks the hatch shut by the chain dangling from it.

The moment he lowers her to the deck, Alana takes off running, clinging to the straps of her pack, searching for a thick door to give them some shelter. Sparks drift through the gaps in the boards overhead and swirl around them, pushed by the breeze left in their wake and their frantic breathing. She smells hair burning.

The stern of the ship comes into view, and there’s no door for them to hide behind. Alana turns to Jared and, glancing around as if she’s assessing this spot, sits down. “Here’s good enough,” she says, hoping she sounds like she’s put thought into it.

Jared sits beside her and gives her a despairing look. “We’re going to die, aren’t we?”

Alana tries to run the calculations in her head, pictures the barrels and barrels of gunpowder mere feet above them and the crumbling wooden deck holding them up, struggles to remember the figures for brisance and sensitivity and yield strength. What she comes up with is a dreadful certainty that her strategy has gone both completely wrong and horribly right. “I don’t…”

Jared drops his head onto his knees with a sigh. “Great.”

The question reverberates, bouncing around in her head like the sound of Holtzer’s gun.

If she dies here, what will she leave behind?

An apartment back in D.C., thousands of miles away. A handful of diplomas and certificates somewhere in a cheap filing cabinet in that apartment. Her parents, whom she hasn’t seen since graduation, and hasn’t really talked to beyond phone calls on birthdays. A reputation as the seventh and last in a line of failed treasure hunters, one who couldn’t even make it to thirty.

She doesn’t have a girlfriend and hasn’t for years. Her only real friend is in this cargo hold with her; if she’d ever considered Dana a friend, she sure doesn’t anymore. And her grandmother…

Maybe, if Alana dies, she’ll see her grandma again.

She’d like that.

Jared, who’s swaying back and forth slightly with one hand over his eyes, abruptly starts speaking, though not to her. “Shema Yisrael, Adonai eloheinu, Adonai echad —”

The _Charlotte_ explodes.

Not all at once — there’s a single thunderous boom from above that throws down shards of wood and metal on their heads and makes Alana clap her hands over her ears, then two, then four, then too many to count, coming thick and fast like the finale of a fireworks show. Which she supposes it is, in a way.

The shower of shrapnel and blast of sound and heat beat down on her, curled up with knees to her chin, caught in the center of a horrible unnatural storm. It feels like she’s being torn apart. It feels like the world is ending.

Then, stillness.

Alana opens her eyes. The world spins on.

The upper decks of the _Charlotte_ are gone, blasted away by the gunpowder and leaving the ship’s hull hollow. The Arctic sun shines down on them, softened by the thinning clouds of black smoke rising from the wreckage.

She coughs. Her chest hurts, her ears hurt, and the ship she’s spent years of her life searching for is now a pile of scraps in the snow. Many of which are currently piled on top of her.

But she’s alive.

Something stirs beside her. A fallen beam rises quakingly and topples over, and Jared pokes his head out. “Hey.”

“Hi,” Alana says. She can barely hear herself over the ringing. “We’re not dead.”

“Oh, good. It would suck if this were the afterlife.” Jared shoves his way out of the heap of debris covering him, stands up, and stumbles. “Actually, it just sucks. Ow.”

“Are you okay?” Alana works herself free of her own pile of rubble. All her limbs seem to be intact and working, which is another big plus.

“I think so? Nothing that’s, like, debilitating.” Jared pauses in flexing his left leg to point at her. “Are you? Because there’s blood all over your hand.”

One look at her left hand, and sure enough, there’s a streak of dried blood that runs down her thumb, over her palm, and onto the hem of her coat sleeve. No new cuts, though. “I think this is all just from earlier.” Her thumb hurts again now that she’s paying attention to it rather than figuring out how not to get blown up.

“I still can’t believe you did that.” Jared looks up and around them at the wreckage. “Or this.”

Alana pulls her gloves back on and sets one foot on a chunk of the mast, testing her weight on it. “We need to get back to ground level.”

“You know what we should have brought? A ladder.”

They climb up the three decks’ worth of broken, splintered ship, boots slipping on piles of wood fragments that slide away at the slightest pressure and on the layer of snow over the wreck that grows thicker the higher they go. When they get to the top, holding onto solid ground again, the horizon is empty.

“They took the snowcats.” Dana probably thought she was leaving behind two corpses and a colossal wreck. “‘Boundless and bare, the lone and level sands…’”

“Those bastards.” Jared staggers to his feet. “At least it wasn’t my laptop they took too.”

Alana brushes off the wooden scraps clinging to her parka and, squinting, scans the chewed-up snow around them. “They went the way we came,” she says, pointing to the fresh sets of tracks overlapping the hours-old marks. “Back to Pangnirtung.”

“‘The slush of ourselves,’” Jared mutters. “How do we get out of here?”

“We walk.”

“You’re kidding.”

“It’s only about nine miles from here to there.” Jared mouths the word “only” to himself while making air quotes. Instead of responding, Alana unscrews the lid of her water bottle and packs in some snow; it’ll melt eventually if she holds it close enough. “Then we fly from Pangnirtung to Iqaluit, from Iqaluit to a major Canadian city, and from there back to the United States. Simple.”

“Oh, of course.” Jared tugs his hat down over his ears. “And once we’ve escaped from the ninth circle of hell, what do we do about Dana? Because she’s definitely going to try to steal the Declaration of Independence. And she’s definitely not paying for our plane tickets this time.”

_I’m not going to help you steal it, or let you steal it for me._

“That’s simple, too.” Alana puts on her glacier glasses. “We stop her.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [YEEEEAAAAHHHH!!!!!](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7uW47jWLMiY)


	2. the necessity which constrains them

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I would apologize for this update taking over two months, but that would imply that future updates will come more quickly, which...probably isn't true. Oops.
> 
> Content warnings for brief mentions of a past character death. That'll probably apply to every chapter.

#### WASHINGTON, D.C.

“You’d think someone would care that a criminal mastermind and her team of minions are going to try to steal the Declaration of Independence.” The heavy revolving door of the J. Edgar Hoover building spins slowly behind Jared and Alana as they exit, despite Jared’s attempt to slam it.

Ever since they made it home, and whenever they haven’t been busy buying groceries on a smaller budget than ever or catching up on all the sleep they lost trekking into the far north of Canada and back again, they’ve been trying to warn someone about what Dana has planned. But it turns out that the Federal Bureau of Investigation doesn’t take information about potential impending thefts of American founding documents all that seriously. Just like the Central Intelligence Agency, and the Department of Homeland Security, and the Department of Justice.

“The FBI receives thousands of tips every week, and they’re certainly not all credible.”

“This can’t be the least credible one, though. Not when there are people reporting alien invasions.”

Alana’s phone vibrates in her pocket; she checks the screen to find that it’s an email confirmation of the appointment she made earlier today with the last agency she could think of that might be able to help them. “If they think the Declaration is safe from being stolen, they’re not going to care if someone tries.”

“So why even bother with a tipline? Anyone with enough power to do anything thinks we’re deranged, and anyone crazy enough to believe us wouldn’t be able to help. Either way, we’re screwed.” Scowling, Jared crumples up the tip form he’d been handed at the end of their meeting with the FBI and throws it into a nearby trash can. “God bless America.”

“We don’t need someone crazy, just someone one step short of crazy. Like everyone thinks we are.”

Jared scoffs. “Obsessed? Only mostly batshit?”

“Not quite.” Alana shows him her phone screen, displaying the email urging them to visit the National Archives and Records Administration at their earliest convenience. “Devoted.”

Half an hour later, they’re sitting in the National Archives, waiting outside the office of the Custodian of the Charters of Freedom to report a threat to the Declaration of Independence, and Jared is playing some kind of game on his phone. Alana leans in front of and across him to snag a glossy blue brochure from the top of a stack on a table next to him; he makes a displeased noise and jabs at the phone screen. The brochure proclaims that the Records of Achievement Award Ceremony and Gala is on the Archives’ schedule for next weekend. There’s no time for Alana to read more about it before the office door opens.

“Ms. Hill?” An employee appears in the doorway. “Dr. Rodgers can see you now.”

“Hill?” Jared repeats in an undertone, when Alana gets up in response and thanks the employee. “Do you have a secret identity I should know about?”

“The Becks are well known among historians,” Alana explains quietly, hoping no one around is listening. “And not in a good way. So, a pseudonym.”

“Right, right. Sticking it to the man.”

The door swings open the rest of the way at Alana’s touch, and she and Jared take maybe three confident steps into the office, walls covered in old flags and historical memorabilia, before stopping short.

“…Or the woman.”

Because Dr. Rodgers, sitting behind a dark wooden desk with a phone pressed to her ear and a air of intense focus, is unmistakably a woman. Her collared shirt, bright white against her tailored black suit jacket and warm beige skin, has a single button open at the top. Two silver studs glimmer in each of her ears; her short black hair is slicked back and parted on one side. As far as Alana can tell, she’s not wearing any makeup.

She’s _gorgeous._

Alana’s staring. She knows she’s staring. Dr. Rodgers ends the phone call, steps out from behind her desk, and says, “Good afternoon,” but it takes a sharp flash of pain from Jared elbowing her in the ribs to get Alana to remember why she’s here and how to have a conversation.

“Phoebe Hill,” Alana says, shaking Dr. Rodgers’ offered hand. “And I think it’s still morning. Not that it would make it any less good to meet you, of course.”

Jared elbows her again. It would seem that’s his gesture for both _please start talking_ and _please shut up now._ The barest flash of a smile crosses Dr. Rodgers’ face.

“Sophie Rodgers,” she says. “No matter what time it is.”

“Is this your neighborhood?” Jared quips. Dr. Rodgers hardly even blinks.

“I’ve heard that one before, if you can believe it,” she says. Her expression turns more thoughtful. “And… I think I’ve seen you before. Do I know you?”

“Uh, no,” Jared says, eyes widening. “Just one of those faces.” He hardly shakes her hand before letting go and planting himself in a nearby chair.

Dr. Rodgers circles back around behind her desk. “How can I — _please_ don’t touch that.”

“Oh! My mistake.” Alana pulls her hand away from the canvas on the wall she’d been reaching for unthinkingly, hanging between a tattered New York flag and a portrait of a man in glasses. It’s a painting of a flag and of a sunrise at the same time, a golden sun bursting through clouds and tinting the sky scarlet over the ocean. “Cuba, right?”

“The Philippines.” That flicker of a smile returns. “Close, but no cigar.”

Alana laughs and lets her gaze drift to the lower right corner of the painting, where the letters SCR are scribbled in silver Sharpie. “Did you paint this?”

Slowly, Dr. Rodgers sits. “I… yes, I did.”

“It’s lovely.”

Dr. Rodgers clears her throat and arranges some papers on her desk. “You said you had something urgent to talk to me about? My assistant told me…”

“Yes, of course.” Alana grabs the closest chair and sits down. This conversation should be easy now that she’s had it four times already. “A group of people is planning to steal the Declaration of Independence.”

An uncomfortable silence follows.

“Seriously,” Jared adds.

Still looking between them with suspicion, Dr. Rodgers reaches for her phone. “If you have a terrorist threat to report, you should really contact the FBI.”

“Already did that,” Jared says. “And it’s not a terrorist threat per se.”

“The FBI told us there was no way the Declaration could be stolen,” Alana says.

“And you don’t believe them?”

“I have some doubts.” Alana leans forward, bracing herself against the desk. “The people we’re concerned with are very good at what they do. But if we could just examine the Declaration, under whatever supervision’s necessary, we’d be able to tell you if there’s anything to worry about.”

Dr. Rodgers folds her hands. “What do you think you might find?”

“A, well.” She hadn’t actually expected to get this far without being shown the door. “A… steganographically altered cartograph… pertaining to, uh, a variety of items of… of both inherent worth and historical interest.”

“Really.”

“Yes.”

“You think there’s a hidden treasure map on the Declaration of Independence?”

Wow, she’s good. “On the back.”

At her side, Jared sinks his face into his hands.

“I’m sorry, but I don’t have the time or the power to help would-be treasure hunters.”

“This isn’t about finding treasure.” Not entirely true, but close enough to the truth for her to live with it. “It’s about protecting it from people who just want to profit off of it. And that means protecting the Declaration too, as unbelievable as it might sound.”

“Ms. Hill,” Dr. Rodgers says, and Alana tries not to wince at being addressed by that name that isn’t hers. “I’ve seen the back of the Declaration of Independence myself. More than once.”

“But have you handled it?” She pulls her chair forward, looking Dr. Rodgers in the eyes. “Held it? Run tests on it?”

“No, I haven’t had the chance.”

Right now, Alana cannot think of a single worse injustice in the world than the fact that this woman she’s just met has never gotten to hold the Declaration of Independence personally. “Isn’t that frustrating? Devoting your life to protecting something but not being able to touch it?”

When she answers, Dr. Rodgers’ words aren’t quite so crisp as they were before. “Yeah. It is.”

Dr. Rodgers’ — Sophie’s — elbows are on the desk, and Alana’s are too, so that their hands are in the center nearly touching. Would it be as terrible an idea as it seems to take Sophie’s hands in her own, to tell her that she deserves better opportunities, to tell her that she’s the most —

Jared coughs loudly, pointedly. It sounds like glass shattering.

“But I trust the people who have handled it.” Dr. Rodgers draws her hands away, setting them into her lap. “And they agree that the only thing on the back of the Declaration is a note that says ‘original Declaration of Independence, dated…’”

“‘Four of July, 1776,’” Alana says in sync with Dr. Rodgers, who gives her a look that could be irritation or surprise.

“So you know there’s nowhere to hide a map.”

“The thing is.” Alana tugs at the hem of one sleeve, wanting to put off her next sentence. “When I say the map is ‘hidden…’ what I mean is that it’s invisible.”

Dr. Rodgers sits back in her chair. “Of course.”

“Goodbye credibility,” Jared says under his breath.

“How did you say you found out about this invisible treasure map?”

“There was a riddle about it. Engraved on a pipe that we have reason to believe is relevant to —”

“Can you show me?”

“Um.” Getting into how they lost the pipe won’t help them at all. “No, I can’t.”

Dr. Rodgers leans in again and whispers to them. “Is the pipe invisible too?”

Jared practically jumps out of his chair. “Well, thanks for talking to us, sorry you couldn’t help, bye!” he says, and zips out the door, leaving a few of the lighter wall hangings fluttering in his wake.

Alana stands more sedately. She can tell when she’s being dismissed, and even if she couldn’t, Jared certainly clarified it for her. “Thank you for taking the time to talk to us,” she says, one of those automatic niceties, and then more sincerely, “It was a pleasure to meet you.”

“Nice to meet you, too.” Dr. Rodgers is already returning to her paperwork.

The burst of color on the wall catches her eye again when she reaches for the doorknob. “That painting really is beautiful,” she says over her shoulder. “You must have put a lot of time and care into it.”

“Thank you,” Dr. Rodgers says, softer, before the door shuts between them with a _thud_ and a _click._

Alana turns away from the office, and Jared’s standing there in the waiting room. “Hey, at least she didn’t call us crazy,” he offers, spinning on one foot and following her across the rotunda of the Archives. “Small favors, right?”

“That doesn’t really help.” It’s clear she thought they were out of their minds, though she was kind enough not to tell them out loud. The other agents they tipped off thought so too, and said so, but for no good reason Alana wants Dr. Rodgers to have a higher opinion of her than that.

“You know, we could go public with this. Post it online somewhere and hope the Internet latches on to it. We don’t exactly have good reputations to ruin, so what’s the worst that could happen?” There’s a pause as Jared thinks it through. “Other than death threats. …Or having our personal information leaked.”

“Someone else getting to the treasure first?” Alana suggests, absently. She comes to a stop in front of the display case, smudged with countless fingerprints, that contains the Declaration of Independence. “Or Dana might panic and try to steal it anyway.”

“Good point.”

“Years of searching all over the world, and it’s right here at home,” Alana murmurs, trailing the fingertips of one hand lightly over the surface of the case. “All of this, the whole American revolution, was founded on one sentence.” The angular cursive, fading from the centuries-old parchment, is nearly illegible in the Rotunda’s low light; she recites from memory instead. “‘But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object, evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right — it is their duty — to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security.’” She taps on the glass over _security._ “People don’t talk like that anymore.”

“No wonder,” Jared says. He’s at her side now, staring blankly at the Declaration. “That was beautiful and all, but I have no idea what you said.”

“If something is wrong, if society is unjust, and you have the ability to change it for the better, you also have the responsibility to make that change.” There’s an idea hovering in the back of her mind, one that, Alana realizes, has been there ever since she climbed out of the wreckage of the _Charlotte_ , one that makes more and more sense the more she lets herself think about it. “I’m going to do it.”

“Do I want to know what ‘it’ is?”

Alana turns to Jared with a slowly growing smile, the electrifying thrill of a new challenge buzzing up her spine.

“I’m going to steal the Declaration of Independence.”

* * *

“You’ll go to prison for this,” Jared warns. Having argued with her about stealing the Declaration for a mile and a half along Constitution Avenue and across the National Mall, he’s now staring up at Alana from his seat on the stairs outside the Lincoln Memorial, while she stands, looking out at the city.

Home, she’d called it. She does live here, technically, and did for the first eighteen years of her life. She knew every store in her neighborhood and every monument in the district, once.

But it wasn’t the same when she returned after five years spent at college. Old, familiar stores were gone, replaced with shiny new cafés or left as vacant lots. Even buildings that hadn’t changed physically looked different than Alana remembered them, a parallax of time, and it made her itch.

So she’s spent three years sleeping and paying rent in D.C. and spending the rest of her time anywhere else. Full-time jobs just over the border in Maryland or Virginia. Diving school in Florida. Meetings of historical and archaeological societies across the country, where she tried to convince the attendees that she was intelligent and well-adjusted enough to deserve treasure hunting money, with mixed results. The coast on both sides of the Irish Sea, searching for the _Charlotte_ before she and Jared had figured out that the ship had never left the Western Hemisphere. And Canada, of course, where the one person who gave her the funding to follow her lifelong dream tried to kill her less than two weeks ago.

Maybe leaving wasn’t the best idea she’s ever had.

“Hello?” Jared waves his hand in front of her face. “Are you listening? Federal prison. They will invent a new federal crime specifically so they can arrest you for it. And probably me as well, while they’re at it.”

“I doubt that.” Tourists traipse up and down the steps, parting around Jared and Alana like they’re rocks in a stream. She doesn’t pay any attention to them. “Declaring it a crime after the fact and then arresting me would be pretty illegal. And unnecessary, considering theft of government property is already a federal crime.”

“That’s not the point. Prison is the point. Most people would be put off by that.”

“Whether or not we steal it, Dana will definitely try. If she succeeds, she’ll either figure out the map, find the treasure, and keep it for herself, or she’ll fail to find the map and destroy the Declaration in the process.” Alana lowers herself onto the same step as Jared. “The one way to protect the Declaration and the treasure is to steal the Declaration before she can. It’s really our only choice.”

“This isn’t a choice!” Now Jared springs to his feet, circling around to face Alana. His hair is ruffled from the several minutes he’s spent running his hands through it in agitation. “I get it, you want to protect a piece of history, it’s very noble, but it’s not that simple. You might as well try stealing him.” Twisting to follow the line of Jared’s outstretched arm, Alana sees that the “him” in question is Abraham Lincoln, resplendent in marble behind them, contemplative. “It can’t be done. It shouldn’t be done, sure, but what really matters is that it can’t be done.”

Intellectually, Alana knows that Jared is making good points — the sheer difficulty of pulling it off, the probable consequences — but none of it shatters her feeling of absolute certainty, that this is the right thing to do and all the pieces will fall into place. It’s easy for her to simply say, “Taking one document should be much easier than taking an entire statue.”

“Just let me have two days, and I’ll prove to you that it isn’t.”

* * *

“There are 38 million printed items in the Library of Congress,” Jared says the moment Alana pulls out a chair beside him in the main reading room. He’s rapidly tapping the eraser end of a wooden pencil on what must be one of those printed items. “And you know what every one of them is saying? ‘Jared knows what he’s doing.’”

Alana peers closely at Jared, at the darker-than-usual circles under his eyes. Has he slept in the past two days? “I think you may be experiencing auditory hallucinations.”

“What? No. Look at this.” Jared pulls out a sheaf of papers from the bottom of a stack in front of him; some of the papers from the top slide off and flutter to the floor. “This is a complete set of plans for the National Archives. Elevations, floor plans, electricity, plumbing, the whole shebang.”

He flips through a few pages. “There are two modes of existence for the Declaration. On display, and in storage. When it’s on display, it’s in a titanium case covered with bulletproof, ultraviolet-proof glass and filled with argon. That entire thing is in a secondary case that’s full of heat sensors that’ll go off if someone with a fever even thinks about touching it, and it’s watched constantly by permanent guards and CCTV cameras and families who decided the National Archives would be a swell place for a vacation and eighth graders on a school field trip who would rather be playing Minecraft or something.”

Deep breaths, more turning of pages, and he plunges back in. “When it’s in storage, it’s still in the titanium case, but it’s lowered into a twenty-foot, fifty-ton concrete and steel vault — on this page here — that’s waterproof, fireproof, and nuclear-weapon-proof. Well, theoretically it’s nuclear-weapon-proof, but that’s never been tested.”

“You don’t have to say all this so fast.”

“And nobody knows what kind of security is on that vault. Could be an electronic lock, could be a biometric scanner, could be some crazy new top secret technology that reads your brainwaves and figures out if you’re planning to steal something, but whatever it is, it’s classified as hell and no one’s been nice enough to leak the details for us.” Jared drops the stack of papers onto the table triumphantly. “What do you think of that?”

“Those are all good points,” Alana says. She’s found a lot of that information herself — Jared isn’t the only one who’s been doing research — but the building plans are new. “Have you heard of the Maginot Line?”

“Jesus Christ.” The pencil in Jared’s hand starts bouncing again. “Uh, really big wall that France built after World War I to keep Germany out, but it wasn’t long enough and Germany just went around it?”

“Oh, I didn’t think you would actually know that.”

“Model UN taught me a lot. What’s the point of this story?”

“The French expected Germany to go around the Line,” Alana says, “through the Ardennes. But they left it undefended because they thought invading by that route would take so long that it wouldn’t be a problem for them. Sometimes the best way to get something is the path no one will bother to stop you from taking.” She sets down the folder that she’s had tucked under her arm. “So that’s what we’ll do.”

“…Right.”

Wedged in the left pocket between photos of the Rotunda and articles on the storage of the Declaration is the single piece of yellowing paper, covered in notes, that Alana’s looking for. “According to this, there are times when the Declaration isn’t on display or in storage.” She gently slides the page free. “Instead it’s in the Preservation Room, where they clean and maintain all the documents and cases. It's much less secure than the display case or the vault.”

“Where are you getting this from?” Jared says, flipping through his own stack of papers again. “Because I don’t have anything in here about a preservation room. Like, at all.”

“From these notes.” She passes the page over to him and watches him glare at it.

“You know this could be completely made up, right?”

“Everything else on there matches the history of the display and the vault. And it’s on the Archives’ letterhead.”

“Oh, huh.” Jared squints at the embossed logo. “Where’d you even get this?”

It’s a perfectly reasonable question, even expected, and yet the thought of answering it freezes her where she sits, the chill of the tundra seeping in. Because that paper, and dozens more — maybe hundreds — had been tucked away in rusting filing cabinets in her grandmother’s house for decades, and then in cardboard boxes under Alana’s bed for years after… after, until she’d had the thought to go looking through them during Jared’s two days of research.

And it’s not like Jared doesn’t know about her grandmother, at least the bare facts, but. The last time Alana mentioned her on this expedition didn’t end well, and she can’t help being the slightest bit superstitious.

(Not to mention, it’s not her grandmother’s handwriting, so she can’t really answer Jared’s question anyway. Right?)

So she puts on a smile and says, “Private sources,” in the cheery way that she knows annoys people sometimes, which normally she doesn’t like to do but is just the kind of misdirection she wants right now.

Jared huffs a little and looks annoyed, but doesn’t press the question. “Okay, so there’s a secret third option for storing the Declaration.” He grabs his stack of papers and starts flicking through them again. “Which would explain the big unlabeled room right across from the vault. But they’re not going to put it in there for our heisting convenience.”

“Unless we set off the sensors on the case. Then the Archivists will have to take the Declaration out of display and into the Preservation Room to check it over.” Where is it, where is it — _there._ The brochure she’d taken outside of Dr. Rodgers’ office is in the very back of her folder. “And the best time for us to do that is this weekend, when they’re holding the Records of Achievement Award Ceremony and Gala. It’ll be easier to get in and out unnoticed, the security personnel will be more distracted —”

“Is that Tom Hanks?”

“What?” Alana flips the brochure over to look at the back, where Jared’s pointing with the eraser end of his pencil. “Oh, it is. The Gala is in his honor this year.”

Jared lays down the pencil. “So you want us to deliberately set off the security measures on the Declaration of Independence, which will _maybe_ get it into the room that, if it exists, is less secure than the bombproof concrete vault, and then you want us to crash this incredibly fancy party to sneak into the possibly real room where the Declaration _might_ be and steal it and leave, all without getting caught. This week. And Tom Hanks will be there.”

“Yes?” Laid out like that, it doesn’t sound nearly so plausible, and for the first time Alana wonders if Jared will be willing to help her at all. He hasn’t said anything serious in the past year about being tired of hunting for treasure, but until two weeks ago everything they were doing was completely legal and completely funded by Dana. Now they’re on their own, they’re planning to commit a crime, and they have to worry about paying rent again.

Jared could easily refuse to be a part of Alana’s plan, and where would that leave her? If she’s going to pull this off, she needs his technical skills, and she needs to know that someone is on her side.

“Well then,” Jared says, cutting right through her spiraling dread, “I guess we’d better get started. How do we do this?”

Alana grins. “I’m so glad you asked. I already have some ideas.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [Alana Decides To Steal The Declaration Of Independence](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=idoYCVLh2qI)

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to:  
> • Jon Turteltaub, Jerry Bruckheimer, Jim Kouf, and the Wibberleys, for making National Treasure and for not suing me.  
> • Nicolas Cage, for making stealing the Declaration of Independence seem so damn _cool._  
>  • [otachi](https://archiveofourown.org/users/otachi/pseuds/otachi), for beta-ing and for sharing my deep abiding love for Alana and Jared.  
> • and you, for reading!
> 
> Kudos and comments warm my heart, and you can also find me on Tumblr @nothingunrealistic.


End file.
